Back in November, Kele Okereke of the British indie rock band Bloc Party released an exclusive 3-D-printed vinyl for charity. McDonald’s has pondered the idea of putting a 3-D printer in every restaurant to print individualized Happy Meal toys for children. The work of digital fabrication is nearly everywhere.
While this technology may seem like something out of a science fiction novel, it’s becoming more and more popular. And thanks to a host of grants given to the University’s architecture department, students at LSU have been able to utilize the same technology to create everything from wristwatches to replicas of canine skulls.
Through analog and digital fabrication tools, students in visiting assistant professor Shelby Elizabeth Doyle’s Edges: Analog and Digital Fabrication course were able to translate digital models into physical ones. “Tools” refers to an array of digital machinery, such as 3-D printers, 3-D scanners, laser cutters and CNC mill machines.
“We’re looking broadly at the idea of how you craft things and what that means in a digital application,” Doyle said. “How do you bring in these tools from a different realm and combine them with handcrafting things?”
Fourth- and fifth-year architecture students in Doyle’s class have brought creations to life through digital fabrication in many forms, most notably the creation of
different types of chairs, which the class displayed at a “chair-sitting party” in late November.
To fabricate the chairs, students “printed” the necessary materials and then assembled them into stable pieces of furniture, each with its own design. Architecture senior Andrew Pharis said this project taught the class not only how to use the machinery, but also the process of crafting objects.
“Each week, we’ve had a problem to solve,” Pharis said.
The group also utilized a 3-D scanner to replicate items from the Hill Memorial Archive, such as a ball created by the graphic artist M.C. Escher and an aged canine skull. By placing an object on a grid and waving a handheld scanner over the object, a digital form of the object can be transmitted into a computer to be viewed as a 3-D model. Large laser-cutting machines were used by the class to etch words into pieces of leather and cardboard.
“There’s a lot of possible applications for it,” Doyle said. “In architecture, we use it more as a creative process as something to test out ideas and something to prototype ideas, but there’s also applications for it in creating really specific things like scanning someone’s mouth and being able to replicate a tooth to exactly fit.”
In the past 20 years or so, scientists have been researching 3-D printing as an option in operations like bone replacement surgery. Through 3-D printing, scientists can also position cells in definite places to accurately match the tissue of a patient’s body.
“The way 3-D printing works is in the same way that a typical printer lays down ink in layers,” Doyle said. “The 3-D printer lays down material in layers, and it depends on the type of 3-D printer, but it’ll either provide a support material, which is what you’re going to break off later, or it will cure certain parts of it so when it comes out of the machine, you’ll actually have an object that replicates your digital model.”
Doyle’s class will display its work in a gallery in the lobby of Middleton Library beginning on Sunday. The exhibit is free.

Gallery • 3 Photos

Mariel Gates

One of the machines used to create designs and textures sits in the woodshop on Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2013, in the wood shop inside the design building.